Being Weird
by Gypsy Love
Summary: Ashley attempts to become friends with Craig again in the beginning of 11th grade, season 4. Ashley POV
1. Chapter 1

I told myself that this year I wouldn't be weird. That I could be friends with him. What was the big deal? Nothing. It was last year. 10th grade. It was over. Over.

So, first day of school and I see him standing by his locker. God, what is it about him? His head down, that sort of tense first days of school look on his face. I panicked. I couldn't do it. I couldn't be friends with him. All I could think of was last year and crying in my room and wishing so badly that it hadn't happened, Manny and the pregnancy and the lies, lies, lies.

He said my name, I heard him. I kind of spun around as I walked by, and I couldn't say anything. I could barely look at him, really. So I walked away fast. So much for not being weird.

Okay, so I was still hurt. It doesn't go away. I hold onto things in my mind, chew on them like a dog with those chew toys shaped like bones. I can still see how he looked last year, the long curly hair, that soft dazed look he seemed to always have, and how I had believed him when he said he loved me in that song. How I had believed, like a stupid kid believing in Santa Claus.

This year he looks a little different. He looks a little different every year. Ninth grade and he was tall and kind of gangly skinny, his hair kind of short but curly at the edges. This year his hair was all straightened and gelled, the curls obliterated. Too bad. I liked the curls. I shook my head. It doesn't matter what I like. I can't even be within 10 feet of him without getting all weirded out.

I'd spent some time being angry with Manny but that wasn't right. It wasn't her fault, not really. Craig was the one to blame, he had hurt me, not Manny. So I tried to forgive Manny in my head, tried to sympathize about the abortion. I mean, an abortion in ninth grade? That is fucked. Poor Manny. But I was jealous, too, in a sick twisted way. Not jealous that she had an abortion but jealous that she had sex with Craig, that his first time wasn't with me.

Oh well. Water under the bridge. It doesn't matter anymore, it doesn't matter this year. But the thought of being friends with him wasn't going away. I wanted to have some sort of relationship with him because I had really liked him as well as loved him. He was smart, creative, and he got things. I could talk to him in a way that I couldn't talk to anyone else. Like that day when we practiced the "Taming of the Shrew" skit in the woods. Before I had met up with him I was hanging out with Paige and Terri and Hazel and they were talking and laughing and I was not involved. What they were talking about, it wasn't connecting with me. We weren't on the same wavelength like we had been before that, eighth grade. I was moving on from them. I was friends with Craig before we hooked up, and I had liked being friends with him, and I missed that.

So I resolved anew to be friends, or at least try to be. I saw him in study hall doodling. Eyes down, legs stretched out, his new spiky bangs across his forehead, almost in his eyes. I looked at him, knowing he was concentrating on his doodles, not aware of me or the room or anything else and so I could look at him and not worry about interacting for these brief seconds.

Did I have the courage to go over and talk to him? I stood in the doorway, watching him. Watching the soft rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. Watching the way the light looked on his hair. Watching the way he pressed his lips together in concentration. Watching. Breathless. Maybe I didn't have the courage to cross the distance and pull him from his concentration, to make him look at me, to form some ridiculous thing to say to him when what I really wanted to say was, 'I miss you, be my friend again,'

"Those are backwards," I said, crossing the distance, breathing in the air with no oxygen, feeling light headed. The music thing he was drawing was backwards, and he looked up at me, his eyebrows raised in surprise that I was talking to him.

"Thanks," he said.

So we talked, about me being weird and being sucked into the last year time warp, and I swallowed hard. He still got it. He understood things. Why did he have to screw it all up with Manny? But I kept that off my face. I was being cool. Last year was no big deal, I was fine now. Fine.

His expression darkened and he told me about the check from his father, told me he was going to rip it up. What had his father done to him that he would rip up a ten thousand dollar check out of anger? Narrowed my eyes at him, and I realized I hadn't been so aware of that. I expected things from him, expressions of love and all that he maybe was not capable of doing for reasons I dimly understood. It was a funny thing to glimpse your own ignorance. To begin to understand that you didn't know everything or even most things.

He never talked about his dad. All I really knew was what he said that first time I had met his father. Gray rainy day, cold, standing on the steps of the school, thinking about the tests that were coming up. And then there he was, Craig's dad, dressed to the nines in that suit, his hair slicked back, black framed glasses. Smiling but looking sort of concerned, too. And then I looked at Craig and he had whipped around at his father's voice and his eyes were wide. He was scared and I saw it for one second and then the scared look went away and he asked him what he was doing there. But his dad had seemed nice enough.

"He seems nice," I had said, and Sean was glaring at Craig with this incredulous 'you're not serious' look and Craig was staring with puzzled anger into the middle distance. He was somewhere else.

"Yeah," Craig said, "when he doesn't have a belt in his hand,"

But I couldn't let him rip up that check no matter how mad he still was.

"Do you know how much fun you could have with that much money?" I said, and his eyes kind of lit up.

At the music store with him, and he was taller now. I noticed it walking beside him. But his voice was the same, that voice that made my stomach feel twisty. We could be friends, sure. This could work. In the music store we were like kids in the candy shop. Kids with ten thousand dollars.

The crybaby wah wah amplifier thing that they had, I was looking at it and pointed it out to him. Joking, he mentioned making me cry last year, mimicked it, "wah wah," and that smile. That careless thoughtless joking he was capable of. I'd almost forgotten. And that time up in my room, making out to beat the band and I'd wanted to do it then, just go all the way right there in my bedroom and I could feel it. If I just let things slide we could have had sex right then and there. He had been breathing all shallow and fast, and his hands were traveling down my body and I felt so almost out of control, heading for a crash. But I had pulled away because sex, the first time, was something special. You couldn't just do it when you were supposed to be doing homework because neither of you wanted to stop. It shouldn't be so careless.

I pushed him away, sat up, and I saw the frustration on his face. Told him I loved him and saw the panic in his eyes, and I started to feel cold. I couldn't have sex with him unless he loved me, and I wasn't all that sure that he did. So I asked him if he felt the same way and instead of doing what I needed him to do, saying something like, "Ashley, I love you. More than I've ever loved anyone," or something naked and real like that he jokes. He joked. Oh how I had forgotten. So I glared at him and walked away. The pain I felt because of him, was still feeling. It was just under the surface. Being with him was sort of painful. Pleasurable and painful, the line blurring, one sliding into the other. I didn't know where I was with him. It was weird. There was no denying that. No fixing it. I didn't know if I should exactly be seeing him, if I should be attempting to be friends with him.

Then we saw the beautiful guitar, the fender strat, and Craig caressed it with reverence. The nervous little salesman kept wanting him to put it back down but Craig said he'd take it. Now that was more like it. That was the kind of fun you could have with ten thousand dollars.

"My dad would hate it," he said, and the manic joy in his eyes still hid a pain that was always there. I wondered again exactly what his father had done to him, and wondered why I hadn't been able to see before that whatever it was effected everything else in Craig's life, even me.


	2. Chapter 2

Maybe Craig's dad would have hated the guitar, but Joey didn't look too thrilled with it, either. We stood in the doorway, crept into the edge of the kitchen. Joey sat at the table with bills in front of him and a dismayed expression on his face. I noticed this but Craig didn't seem to. He just plopped the guitar case on top of the bills and scattered envelopes that surrounded Joey.

It had to do with the price of the guitar, that's when Joey backed away from it like it was dirty. Before that he had seemed nearly as excited as Craig was about it. But Craig shrugged and it wasn't much of my concern, and we left the kitchen and Joey's scowling expression and the white mountain of bills. We went to the garage.

It brought me back, the garage. All the times we had come in here, playing music. Laying on the couch, making out. How much I had wanted to go further but wouldn't let myself, wouldn't allow that until I was sure he loved me and could say it. How naïve and demanding I had been.

He lifted the guitar from its case like taking a baby from a cradle, and it rested in his arms. I looked at the gleam on the body of the guitar, I looked at his eyelashes as they nearly touched his cheeks. He played a few quick chords and then looked up at me, the smile wide and beautiful. My breath caught. How could this work? How could we be friends?

"Uh, Craig, I think I should go," I said, but reluctantly. His smile slipped for a second and then he shrugged.

"Okay," he said easily, and I looked down.

"Hey," he said as I was nearly at the door, my hand on the doorknob. He grabbed my arm and I looked at his hand holding my arm and then I looked at him.

"Ash, uh, thanks for today. It really made me feel better," Oh God, the way he could get that naked emotion into his voice, in his eyes. It just pulled you along.

"Yeah, no problem," I said, and I so wanted to kiss him. I probably could, if I just leaned in toward him. But we, we weren't in that space anymore. We weren't anything anymore. The friendship wasn't rebuilt, not just from one day of insane guitar shopping. We were on unsteady ground, on a fault line. So I couldn't kiss him or anything like that, despite wanting to.

"See you tomorrow," I said, and he said sure and bye again and I left. Out in the cool September night air, wrapping my arms around myself. I walked briskly to my house, thinking lustful thoughts that wouldn't come to anything.

"Ashley, where have you been?" My mother, and she was looking at me with her hawk eye. My mother was nearly psychic. It was like she knew I was with Craig. How did she know?

"Just out," I said, not able to admit to her where I was, who I was with. She'd lecture me up and down, I could hear it now, 'what, Ashley, you were with Craig? After what he did to you? After the way he hurt you? What are you thinking?' So, uh, no. I couldn't admit anything to her.

She still gave me that evil eye, her arms crossed. But she didn't understand. She didn't understand that I was willing to give him another chance, at least as far as friendship was concerned. It wasn't for her to understand. I just wished she'd trust me a little more, trust me to make my own mistakes and learn from them. Sometimes parents want to put you in this safe padded box where nothing will ever hurt you. They don't realize that being in that cramped, dark, airless box hurts, too.

"Where have you been, Clarice?" Toby said in his creepy Hannibal Lecture voice. I smiled. Toby wasn't the annoying little toad he'd been. I mean, I could see the humor in him now.

"With Craig," I said, and waited for his reaction. He shook his head in mock sorrow.

"Oh, Clarice, do you think that's wise?"


	3. Chapter 3

Toby sat on the edge of my bed, and I played with the bedspread.

"Craig, huh?" he said, the last vestiges of the Hannibal Lecture voice gone.

"Yeah," I said, and felt myself almost blush. I could close my eyes and see him, the gelled curls kind of flattened into spiky bangs, his large eyes, full lips. If nothing else he was a beautiful boy. I looked at Toby, his thick dark eyebrows, his thick dark framed glasses, the funny shape of his lips. I had to admit I loved Toby like a brother.

"Do you want to hook up with him again?" Toby said, and I shrugged. I did, some part of me did. But that wasn't my aim. I just really wanted to be friends with him again.

"No, I don't think so…I mean, it didn't work out too well the last time,"

Toby knew better than almost everyone else how not well it worked out. I'd wanted to have sex with him, with Craig. I'd dreamed about it, the candles, the music, his caresses getting stronger, his kisses. The feeling of being pinned beneath him, of being penetrated by him. Of us kind of becoming one, some blissful magic moment. But he wrecked it. He had it with Manny and then he lied to me, lead me on, got her pregnant. No. It was too much hurt, too much betrayal. I didn't think I could trust him to be my boyfriend again. But I thought he could be my friend.

"What do you think?" I said to him, and he looked up at me from under his caterpillar eyebrows, his expression thoughtful.

"I don't know, Ash. I think you should be careful,"

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"Hi," Craig. He stood at my locker. I put my books on the shelves and smiled at him. He made my heart beat faster.

"Hi," I said. Were we becoming friends? It was so hard to tell. I saw lust in his eyes. I knew I felt the lust coursing through my body, pulling me toward him. It felt like it had last year, before he destroyed everything. It felt just the same, like one of us had been away for a vacation and we were picking up where we left off. But I didn't want to pick up where we left off. I wanted to go back further to how it was in ninth grade when I was dating Jimmy and I was seeing that Craig was getting things, getting my concepts, my wavelength.

We weren't in many of the same classes since he took the easier ones. It was okay, I mean, I knew he had a lot to deal with and that school wasn't quite the breeze for him he wanted people to think it was. I'd seen him in the classes we had shared, seen the constantly tapping foot, the inability to focus. At times I'd practically diagnosed him with ADD. I'd seen the missing homework assignments and the bombed test grades and science was just beyond him. The easier classes were better for him because he was smart, I knew he was. He just sometimes had trouble with school. Me, on the other hand, I'd always excelled at it. I could concentrate, I could remember everything I read and studied. But my life was less messy than his.

The bell rang, interrupting our gazing at each other. And that's what we were doing. I could get lost in his eyes. And I could feel how I was the complete center of his attention. He licked his lips and looked around when the bell rang, the slight dismay on his face that we had been interrupted.

"Hey, I'll see you at lunch, okay?" he said. We had the same lunch, which was cool. I nodded, already looking forward to it. I wouldn't hardly see him until then.

"Okay," I said, my voice soft, my head tilted in that flirty way. I didn't want to act that way but I couldn't seem to help it.


	4. Chapter 4

Toby cornered me by my locker after third period.

"Hey," he said, pushing his glasses up his nose. I got my stuff out of my locker, glancing down at him.

"Hey," I said, hugging my books against me, thinking about Craig.

"So how's it going?" he said, talking about Craig. We lived together, so our conversations were a little bit of short hand.

"Good, I guess. No, it's fine,"

"Still being friends?" he said, falling into step with me. I shrugged. I just really didn't know. The weird feeling wouldn't go away.

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Walking to the lunch room, my heart already racing at the thought of seeing him, I wondered what it was I thought I was doing. I couldn't really be friends with him. You couldn't go backwards. Not really. Life was like a river that just flowed to the ocean, you couldn't go back to some previous point in the river. Or life was like some tragic novel rushing toward the conclusion of your death, and you couldn't turn the pages back.

But I shrugged it off. I went to that cafeteria where Craig was waiting for me, kind of lying to myself about us being friends. I slid into my chair opposite of him and smiled, and saw him smile in return.

"Did Joey yell at you about the guitar?" I said, remembering the disgusted look on Joey's face once he saw how much it had cost, even though it was Craig's money. His look darkened, and he got the distant look he sometimes got. I guess Joey had went off.

"Uh, yeah. He yelled," He looked upset for a few seconds more but then the look cleared. He pushed it away.

"But, who care about Joey? How were your second and third period classes?" He had this way of looking right into my eyes, of hanging on my words. That was one of those rare things and Craig had it. He would really listen, really be interested in what you were saying. So often when I talk to people, people like Paige, I get the feeling that they're just waiting for their turn to talk. With Craig you never get that feeling.

"Pretty good, you know," I said, and rambled on a bit about stuff that happened, about Toby and my mom and Jeff and songs I was writing and things I was feeling, and the whole time I just felt it, felt him listening. God, I'd really missed that.

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"Ashley," my mother said when I got home. I hadn't come right home. I'd stopped off at the Dot with Ellie. Something in her tone was chilling. I looked up at her cautiously.

"What?" I said, looking at the apron she had slung around her waist so she could work with food. She always liked to protect her clothes. She liked to protect everything.

"Craig called," Her tone was deadly. This was clearly unacceptable to her.

"Okay," I said, and my tone was all like, 'calm down,'

"Why is _he_ calling?" she said, and she said he like he was Damian or something. I had to admit it was touching. My mom saw how hurt I was and I knew she didn't want it happening again. And Craig was, I don't know, intense. People ended up hurt around him. But it was my life and the chance I was willing to take. I wished she could just understand this.


End file.
